Railroad customers, particularly those having to ship large amounts of product on a relatively tight time schedule, have a critical need for reliable rail plans. These rail plans should provide the railroad customer, as well as the servicing railroad, with reliable information about the resources available at a given time and place (e.g., the sets of cars available to service a particular route), accurate forecasts of train arrival and departure times at product loading and unloading facilities, and potential bottlenecks within the product transportation system (e.g., Facility queuing and dwell times, among other things.
Current rail planning systems, however, are subject to a number of problems. Typically, each individual customer uses multiple unlinked spreadsheets and manual calculations of the various parameters to generate rail plans. Moreover, these plans are normally not based on real set cycle data nor account for actual train movements. As a result, not only have the railroad customers struggled to generate reliable rail plans, but the servicing railroad is faced with the resulting burden of reconciling and proofreading spreadsheets from different customers in addition to the normal burden of managing the trains themselves.